courtesy photo by Lisa Johnson
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Last month, on the night his new album came out, Chuck Ragan was 400 miles down the California coast from his home in the little town of Grass Valley. He was playing to a packed house at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles.
He called it an incredible turnout, the people who came to see the Hot Water Music frontman and DIY punk luminary continue to ride the recent wave of his rough-faced acoustic music. He played that night with just himself and Joe Ginsburg on the upright bass.
“People were hollering and heckling,” Ragan says of the show. “But in a positive way.”
Less than ten days later, Ragan departed on a national tour that takes him all the way across the country to promote Till Midnight, his fourth solo album which was released March 25 on Side One Dummy. This includes a stop at Lincoln’s Vega this Sunday, as well as a notable five-show sort of homestand in Florida in early May, where Hot Water Music was formed in Gainesville in 1993.
The surge of album release activity stands in contrast, though, to the way Ragan and his old bandmates would have released an album 15 years ago. It’s an observation that illustrates both an atmospheric way in which a changing system of music delivery has affected musicians and that Ragan is seasoned enough to a remember a time when being on tour when an album dropped was a miscalculation. Of course, Rolling Stone was around in the mid-1990s, but they weren’t streaming your album in-full six days before it officially came out.
“I distinctly remember having conversations when [Hot Water Music] was talking about putting out a record and saying ‘Man, we don’t want to go out now, we want to go out two months from now!’ Which is kind of unheard of now in the industry,” Ragan remembers.
“That didn’t make any sense to us because nobody would know the songs. One cool thing about going on tour is people sing and dance with you: the fans and the people who cared enough to open up the record and learn the lyrics. That normally didn’t happen until after at least a month or two.”
And trying to force feed or wean a Hot Water Music audience onto songs it didn’t know doused them in undesirable cold water. While a Chuck Ragan acoustic show (now billed as Chuck Ragan and the Camaraderie) still promises Ragan’s thunderous growl and a thumping upright bass, far from cosmetic, he remembers those punk shows as a storm that shouldn’t have been interrupted.
“When we’re talking about a Hot Water-style show show where it’s cranked to 11, to full throttle, from start to finish, any time you would throw a new song in there, the entire energy would drop. But those were the songs we were most excited to play.”
Ragan’s new album doesn’t destroy the binary between his much-talked-about transition from punk music to folk music, but it does make the distinction seem too categorical. There is an acoustic influence to the album — with Ragan on acoustic guitar, Ginsburg on bass and fiddle from Jon Gaunt — but it’s pretty identifiable as rock music. It owes an aesthetic debt to Springsteen, rooty, but with melodic choruses fit for the stadiums Ragan has never shown interest in playing. The dark bars and clubs that have long been his speed still feel like the appropriate stages for his lyrical social justice initiatives, peeking out from songs about love and personal devotion.
The song “Non Typical” finds Ragan’s rough voice swollen with passion that doesn’t really feel the need or the self-consciousness to deliberate between the political and the personal. It’s a song, fundamentally, about people and their challenges.
“It’s about people who have been in a situation where they’ve fallen in love with someone and it hasn’t been supported … by their parents or their elders or the church,” Ragan says. “I’ve seen people try to squash or dismantle a loving relationship and it’s the most heartbreaking thing. The fact is, it goes unsaid, man, if you love someone it’s no one’s place to tell you who you should or should not be with.”
Here, Ragan’s lyrics consider love at an elemental level, a necessity as of the essence as water or air — ”I need you, like I need all my blood and my breath …”
“It’s a tune about undying love and realizing we all have a choice to maintain a better atmosphere for the people we love.”
Some of the songs on Till Midnight have grown out of notes and scribbles Ragan may not have fully comprehended at the time of their writing. He is a committed workman to chasing the ideas and melody lines as they come, whenever they come — nothing too mystical or writerly. At his Northern California home near the Sierra mountains, there is evidence of the times songs have pulled him away from other tasks: table saws abandoned outside, laundry left unfolded.
“I want to write what’s going on with me right now,” he says. “That’s what makes songwriting work for me as an emotional release. So I have this whole vat of stuff to go through. Sometimes I’ll have something I’m working on right then and there, and sometimes I’ll weed through something that I wrote two years ago that hits me in a different way. I may not have understood it. I just kind of blurted it out didn’t go any further and I’d say, ‘Whelp, whatever that means.’”
This practice leaves Ragan with an extensive personal collection of unassembled song pieces, disjointed verses and choruses, 90-second tunes that, who knows, might evolve into the next Chuck Ragan album two or three years down the road. Or they may live alone forever, untouched and unfinished in Ragan’s notebooks and papers, having served their purpose just by existing.
“[Only] half the songs I write make it onto recordings. A lot of them aren’t meant to be heard, they’re just for me. Sometimes they get thrown into the fire pit. But those are just as important as the ones that make it onto records.”
As the founder of The Revival Tour — which annually brings together a touring collection of Ragan’s peers on a collaborative, acoustic tour — and an influential figure in punk music for two decades, when he stops in Lincoln Sunday, it will put Ragan back in the vicinity of musicians whose lives he’s touched. Mike and Kerry Semrad of The Bottle Tops played their first show as a band at Duffy's Tavern the last time Ragan came through Lincoln in December 2011. Mike Semrad’s former band Haywood Yards has toured with Ragan, and in this Hear Nebraska interview, the Semrads call Ragan one of their biggest musical heros, on the level of Johnny Cash.
As special as that connection might appear, it’s not a stretch to think the magnanimous Ragan might have a pair of “Semrads” at every stop on his nearly 40-city tour: people he’ll talk to for 20 minutes at the merch table, catching up, fielding compliments and swapping old stories.
“[Mike and Kerry] are good folks … I treat people the way I want to be treated. I would hope they would carry that on and do the same. I was raised that way, and if there’s anything I've learned through living and working within the music scene, you learn a lot of patience and the importance of gratitude.
If people are spending the time and the energy and money to come to meet you halfway, it takes a lot of all those things to just make it to a show, not to mention buy a record. It takes a lot. For that, I feel like just showing up and playing and then taking off for the next town isn't really meeting people halfway.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.